JOURNEY THROUGH TWIN PEAKS: Season 3 in pieces (a summer of mini-chapters from the chapter 36 video)

Since it will be a while until new Journey Through Twin Peaks chapters are ready (I am currently barely keeping up with my "Path back" schedule), I decided to upload my Journey video on season three in smaller, bite-size chunks, each between three and six minutes. My chronological coverage of "The Return" is already available as a full half hour on Vimeo and YouTube (where it is currently undergoing a dispute that will hopefully be resolved soon). It is also embedded within the larger Part 5 which wrapped up this winter. However, I wanted to give viewers the opportunity to linger over the different sections of Lynch's and Frost's winding narrative - in some cases, I isolated a span of episodes, in others a double that aired the same night, only half of a particularly dense episode.

Rather than dump these on the channel all at once, I shared them one by one on the fourth anniversaries of the episodes. When I had to delay the releases of the Part 8 videos, I pushed them back to the seventy-sixth anniversary of the first atomic testing on July 16 and the sixty-fifth anniversary of the fictional events in New Mexico, and I set the videos up as "premieres". This created a fun little occasion for each one, with people setting reminders, hopping in ahead of time, and/or joining a chat. This is something I'd like to do in the future as well, starting with the "Twin Peaks Conversations" I'll be uploading monthly on YouTube.

Here are all of the videos from this summer:

The Anti-Pilot (Parts 1 & 2)

From Cosmos to Carpet (Parts 3 & 4)

Your Weekly Peaks (Parts 5 - 8)

The Fire and the Fireman (Atomic Aftermath) - watch here if embed is unavailable

A Darkness in the Desert (New Mexico 1956) - watch here if embed is unavailable

Bittersweet Passage (Parts 9 - 13) - watch here if embed is unavailable

Forked Path (Parts 14 - 16) - watch here if embed is unavailable

The Two-Sided Finale (Parts 17 & 18) - watch here if embed is unavailable

You can also watch them on a single playlist.

The long return to Journey Through Twin Peaks: a behind-the-scenes essay (pt. 3 of 4)

The first part of this essay provides the context which my original 2014 - 15 video series JOURNEY THROUGH TWIN PEAKS grew out of and the second part details their process of creation. This third part focuses on the videos I published in 2020 - 21 which cover Twin Peaks' third season and the other work of the show's contributors. A fourth part of this essay will follow next year, after I've created more videos focused exclusively on season three.

Visit

Journey Through Twin Peaks Part 5 - "Over the Mountain Pass"

to view all videos discussed in this essay

In the summer of 2018, following a cousin's wedding near San Francisco, I flew north to visit another cousin in Seattle. During this visit, we took a day trip to the area where Twin Peaks was shot, my first visit to the small towns of North Bend and Snoqualmie, as well as a few locations closer to the city - or even in its very heart (did you know that the rustic Roadhouse is actually a theater embedded right in downtown Seattle?). I'd moved from California to New Hampshire a couple years earlier but while out west again I was struck by how much...bigger everything is there. Not just the massive trees which dwarf eastern timber, but also the large patches of uninhabited areas between cities as well as the very sprawl of those cities (Los Angeles obviously, but even smaller urban centers like Seattle feel more spread out, less clustered, than a metropolis like New York or Boston). Paradoxically, both the bulk of massive natural phenomena like redwoods or the Rockies and the preponderance of empty or less densely populated spaces contribute to this experience of bigness, vast both vertically and horizontally.

About a year and a half after this trip, I finally got to work on new chapters of Journey Through Twin Peaks (although the ideas behind them had been percolating for a long time). These sprawling, scattered, grand-scale videos, in process and end result, bear the same relationship to my earlier videos as the West Coast does to the East. The contrasts are endless and illuminating. Parts 1 - 4 of Journey, assembled in just over four months in the fall and winter of 2014 - 15, were acts of extreme concentration. Little else filtered into my consciousness aside from Twin Peaks and my devotion to illustrating its chronological journey, mostly using clips from the series or film even as I expanded and experimented with my palette in the latter chapters. Part 5 of Journey, the form that these 2020 - 21 videos would eventually be assembled into, took nearly a year, during which my attention was spread across many other projects too. This also happened to be perhaps the most eventful historical epoch of my entire life even if I (like most of the world) was isolated in my experience of it. Part 5 was itself quite jumbled - both in terms of chronology and subject matter - and on top of that it was created all out of order, with the "last" section completed and released nine months before what were supposed to be earlier passages. Part 5 also ended up being longer than any previous comparable unit, indeed half the runtime of the previous four parts combined (its largest component chapter was itself almost as long as Part 1), and far from limiting itself to Twin Peaks (though it leapt around all three seasons and Fire Walk With Me, along with spin-off materials) it incorporated clips from well over a hundred different source materials scoured from YouTube or via hunts down different avenues.

Yet out of this often bewildering and overwhelming process, I was able to craft something that feels very much of a piece with the earlier videos - an expansion that carries on their spirit - and when I wasn't exasperated with delays or juggling different inputs and outputs, I had a ball putting it together. An order eventually emerged from the swirling activity.

If the writing, preparation, and editing of Journey Through Twin Peaks Part 5 was a complicated and drawn-out endeavor, so was the lead-up to it. Though I'll try to keep myself focused on the period of these videos, an introduction is necessary to set the stage because five long years passed between finishing Part 4 and initiating Part 5, much longer than I expected.

Citizen Kane at 80 (video): Returning to Mirrors of Kane series w/ "Thatcher" chapter

Five years ago, I kicked off a brand new video series to honor Citizen Kane's seventy-fifth anniversary. However, the first video hit during a lull on my site and a busy time in my offline life and I let the project die...or rather, go to sleep. I'm not fully resurrecting it yet - that will wait until I'm much further along on my new "Path back to Journey Through Twin Peaks" schedule - but I wanted to do something for the film's eightieth anniversary this month (how time flies!) so here we are. It helps that the chapter next in line turned out to be much simpler than the first, an introduction which incorporated many different approaches and pieces of media. Chapter 2 focuses on the film's first "narrator," Walter P. Thatcher, Kane's guardian and constant foil. Thatcher's sequence is unique in several ways, encompassing Kane's entire life rather than a single period, conveyed through a written memoir rather than a direct interview with the reporter character, and keeping Kane at more of a distance than the later flashbacks. The challenges here are different from that expansive intro, as I illustrate or visually expand upon various concepts using limited footage from the relatively brief Thatcher material. I also dip into the documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane in order to discuss the differences between William Randolph Hearst and Charles Foster Kane (and the similarities between Kane and Orson Welles).

The chapter is also available on Vimeo:

And if you want to watch the whole series thus far, including the trailer, check out my YouTube playlist.

Images from a return to Twin Peaks (2 of 2): Mark Frost, Other Collaborators, and The Return

The first collection features many other screenshots from Part 5

(corresponding to chapters 29-33 on YouTube)

This concludes my screenshot collection of all juxtapositions, superimpositions, explanatory titles, collage-like mosaics or other visual manipulations from my video essay series Journey Through Twin Peaks Part 5 - "Over the Mountain Pass". This process has escalated with each part - for Parts 1 and 2, a few screenshots were included alongside the videos; Part 3 featured many more, and by Part 4 there were so many screenshots I needed a whole separate post for them. By Part 5, I had to split this screenshot collection in two, and this round-up right here is over twice as long as the previous one. The Mark Frost section in particular is cluttered with original compositions, which is what happens when you need to visualize the work of someone whose output was frequently literary. As a result, that standalone video on YouTube (chapter 35) took months to create, far longer than any other individual entry in Journey (you can also watch chapter 34, about the original series collaborators, and chapter 36, a chronological journey through the third season, on YouTube). Hopefully this offers an enjoyable opportunity to pause and explore the various comparisons and illustrations on their own, separate from the whole.

Journey Through Twin Peaks: Part 5 - Over the Mountain Pass

A two-hour journey bringing us back to Twin Peaks

(available in eight individual chapters or as a two-volume video essay)

This is a follow-up to Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 of Journey Through Twin Peaks; images related to Part 5 are featured in my first and upcoming (live in mid-March) second collection of screenshots.

Follow the path through Journey Through Twin Peaks to keep track of the upcoming Part 6

What's onscreen: a tale of two creators, David Lynch and Mark Frost, who were far apart fifteen years ago yet found themselves collaborating once again, on a revival of their most beloved work, within a decade. Although divided up into several different arrangements depending how you watch, this tale unfolds in four stories that coalesce into a fifth.

Images from a return to Twin Peaks (1 of 2): The In-Between Years and a Detour into Lynchland

The second collection, to be published here in March, will feature many other screenshots from Part 5

Here are screenshots of all the juxtapositions, superimpositions, titles, collage-like mosaics or other visual manipulations from the first half of my video essay series Journey Through Twin Peaks Part 5 - "Over the Mountain Pass". I included (far fewer) image highlights with the cross-posts for Parts 1, 2, and 3; for Part 4 I needed a whole separate post full of screenshots and now I obviously need double that for Part 5! I'll share the second half in a week or two (update: postponed by several months), depending on when I finish the last of these videos. You can see these images in their original video context in my cross-posts for chapters 29, 30, and 31-33. However, these images aren't simply teasers for the videos - I hope in this format, where they can be lingered over, they fuel new contemplation and enjoyment.

Though most of this line-up appears in the order of the videos, it begins with one of the most fun passages to create, in which I juxtapose Lynch's stylistic evolution over the course of his film career from 1977 to 2006 with the six Twin Peaks episodes he directed in 1990 and 1991. It's amazing how they serve as a microcosm of that larger pattern.

New path through Journey Through Twin Peaks

This schedule is NO LONGER ACTIVE and has been replaced by

"The Path back to Journey Through Twin Peaks"

as of May 2021

INTRODUCTION

So far, I've outlined two schedules to help me create new Journey Through Twin Peaks video essays - and to make the process transparent for curious followers. The first "path," which took me right up to the first new video in five years, was more successful than the second; intended to carry me to the last video, this summer's schedule was abandoned when steps fell completely out of order and I passed initial deadlines by months. For this third phase, I've tried to hew closer to that first approach, as I chart a nine-month outline that can guide me through the remaining thirteen or so videos as well as my obligations to patrons (monthly reward podcasts) and my desire to keep the site active while I focus on new videos that may not appear for months. The key is to create a backlog of work ahead of time, prioritizing time-sensitive obligations, so that once I return to the world of Journey Through Twin Peaks I can stay there as long as possible.

To pull this off, the new "path" has four parts: "catch-up" (unfinished work I fell behind on), "new runway" (creating an extensive backlog to keep up my public and patron routine through June 2021 - I have now decided to create a backlog through September instead), "video prep" (previously one step but now broken into several to reflect different components of my research), and finally "video focus." I also make note of possible, hopefully brief, interruptions along the way as well as a general timeframe I'd like to keep these steps within.

As before, I will continuously update this page to track my progress. This Twitter thread will follow along in even closer detail as I complete different components of each step.

THE STEPS ON THE PATH

JOURNEY THROUGH TWIN PEAKS: Original series collaborators (video debuts this month)

update 10/7: The video is finally published

ORIGINAL INTRO & DAILY PROGRESS

Stay tuned and bookmark this post for more news and eventually, the next Journey Through Twin Peaks video chapter.

Consider this post both an announcement and a placeholder for the next, long-delayed "missing chapter" of my Twin Peaks video series - about the collaborators on the original series, it's provisionally titled "A Candle in Every Window" (playing on my memory of a quote from the Mark Frost introduction to the re-published Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, the I can't find the actual passage at present). I will update this post with my progress as I go (which I will also be keeping track of on Twitter) and I will cross-post the video here when I'm done.

Though I'm hesitant to proclaim deadlines given how often they get postponed, in this case I can make a commitment as well. All of my available "online project" free time will be devoted to this video from now on - I won't even tackle my monthly patron commitments until the video is uploaded on YouTube (another incentive to get it done by the last week of September if not sooner). [revision 9/18: unfortunately, I quickly discovered that I need to finish a Mark Frost book, thanks to a hard library due date, and complete one more public podcast which I overlooked, but after THAT, no distractions!] Updates begin, hopefully, as soon as tonight...

UPDATES ON THE PROGRESS OF CHAPTER 34:

* * *

September 18: re-wrote the narration after losing the file I recorded in July (this version is shorter, although still too long, and will require less cutting as I tighten the chapter during editing)

September 21: re-recorded the narration, catching up to where I was mid-summer

September 23: although not directly related to this video, I published a tie-in public podcast on films by Twin Peaks episode directors (listen to it here) - this was also the last obstacle in my path to focusing entirely on chapter 34 during my "online work" time

September 26: finally began editing the video - I will now use this post to track, day-by-day, how far this process has progressed so stay tuned and keep checking in

September 27: narration is cut down (some material may be saved for an eventual standalone video) and I've begun choosing clips for the introduction

September 28: continued choosing clips for the introduction - a montage of house/lights footage from different films by episode directors

September 29: finished intro montage and began designing "editors" mosaic sequence (displaying a clip from every original series episode on the same screen)

September 30: continued designing "editors" mosaic sequence (chose clips for each episode and began creating titles/freeze-frames etc

October 1: completed the "editors" mosaic sequence; here is a screenshot:

October 2: created opening of "directors" sequence with clips of directors' credits and juxtapositions with their Mad Men episodes

October 3: continued "directors" sequence with Mad Men episodes and some of their feature films

October 4: finished "directors" sequence including side-by-side montage of episodes and feature films (this was by far my longest day)

October 5: created quick "production designer/cinematographers/composer" sequence and began "writers" sequence - now all that remains is the Harley Peyton/Robert Engels part, which is about half the chapter but much less visually complex than other sequences, and I'll have all day today to work on it

October 6: created the majority of the Harley Peyton/Robert Engels writers sequence (although I spent too much time trying to figure out what clips had been used in past chapters through a more in-the-weeds approach than necessary) and I stopped working at the point where I would cross-reference other Engels work; also, worth noting there will be one coda after Engels is finished, addressing Frost in a way that transitions into the following chapter

End of Spring update (including new schedule, works in progress & Journey Through Twin Peaks on Vimeo)

As a few projects take longer than expected, now seemed like a good moment to pause for a status update - and the requisite random Anna Karina picture that always goes with these posts. Early June was supposed to be reserved for some behind-the-scenes work before kicking off Part 6 of Journey, but not only is Part 5 unfinished, my side work hit unforeseen snags too. Mad Men was removed from Netflix literally the day before I planned to resume my viewing diary with season four, so I'm now awaiting physical discs in the mail. This is necessarily a slower process (yes, the site still offers that service; God help us when they don't). I'll now be working on these alongside my video essays instead of beforehand - so expect the first one in a few weeks rather than right away.

So where do we go from here? I mentioned this while cross-posting my Twin Peaks Unwrapped appearance last week, but I will be taking a new approach to my weekly schedule going forward, hopefully for years to come (with some exceptions in 2021, as noted below). Every week I'll publish at least one new entry - even if it's a simple announcement like this one - and, on rare occasions, I'll even publish as many as five between Monday and Friday. But different days will be reserved for different types of entries, with 8am the standard time. Here's what I have in mind  (click on images for past examples):

MONDAY

any TV viewing diary entry (*or Twin Peaks character series in January - May 2021) reserved for Monday

TUESDAY

latest round-up for any of my video essays published on YouTube or Vimeo reserved for Tuesday

WEDNESDAY

any written film review or general essay (*or Twin Peaks character series throughout all of 2021) reserved for Wednesday

THURSDAY

monthly, maybe eventually weekly, round-up of my own podcast (Patreon and coming-soon public episodes), plus guest appearances on other podcasts when applicable, reserved for Thursday

FRIDAY

RANDOM/BONUS entry (*including Twin Peaks character series in January - May 2021) reserved for Friday

You can check in on a given day depending on your interest or, as always, follow my "blogroll" page to keep track of my latest work of any type. Again, months could go by without, say, a particular TV viewing diary entry or video essay; for the most part, I won't be posting five times a week - more usually, I'll be sticking to one or two ongoing projects at a time. But keeping these days reserved for a particular type will keep these projects from bumping into each other and ideally offer readers some sense of routine to my ongoing work.

As the schedule indicates, I've been tinkering behind the scenes on my long-paused "TWIN PEAKS Character Series" (whose original incarnation was published in early 2017, and forced to halt because I couldn't reach the top twenty before the Showtime premiere). The new series will include entries for new characters, extend entries on old ones who reappeared, and update the ranking based on season three - as indicated, the plan is currently for it to run between the first and last week of 2021, with three entries almost every week through the end of May, and a single entry for each of the top thirty from June onward.

Of course, before I get there I need to focus on Journey Through Twin Peaks throughout 2020. As soon as I finish this month's Lost in Twin Peaks rewatch podcast episode for Patreon (covering the big climax of the Laura Palmer investigation), I'll be back to work on the two "missing" chapters - 34 and 35 - from that video series. One video will survey the broad sweep of collaborators like Harley Peyton, Bob Engels, and the various episode directors of the original series. The other video, which will probably be one of my longest chapters of all, will explore the work of Mark Frost and how it relates to Twin Peaks old and new.

Because I wanted to get some season three material up for the third anniversary on May 21, I raced ahead to chapter 36 - and ran straight into the brick wall of YouTube copyright police. The song "Wicked Game" was flagged at the end of the video, which was blocked for two days. It was restored after that (as the dispute remained pending), gathering views, likes, and great comments, and was then blocked again, forcing me to appeal and wait even longer for the situation to be resolved - probably mid-July at the earliest.

I've covered those snags here and here but at the moment, the most important update is that I've uploaded chapter 36 on Vimeo, the site I usually save for complete "Parts" (given that chapter 36, at nearly half an hour, is as long as chapters 1 - 5 combined, it's a worthy exception). You can watch and share it from here:

And now Vimeo also includes a compilation of chapters 31 - 33, my trilogy of videos on the evolving aesthetic of David Lynch and the nature of his collaboration with editor/partner Mary Sweeney, into a single standalone presentation titled "Dream Souls." (Due to repeated technical difficulties, I had to replace the initial video file but the correct version is now available.)

Thanks and see you with some fresh videos soon - hopefully by the end of the month.

JOURNEY THROUGH TWIN PEAKS: David Lynch's aesthetic evolution & the Mary Sweeney years (videos)

Update 8/8/21: The YouTube version of chapter 32 is now age-restricted and cannot be embedded (you can view it here). Here is the same chapter on Vimeo:

.

In these three chapters of the ongoing video series, I explore the Twin Peaks director's visual style as it evolved over the course of a half-century with particular attention to his features. I also introduce David Lynch's decade-long collaboration with editor/writer/producer Mary Sweeney and discuss the disastrous debut of Fire Walk With Me at Cannes in 1992 (for way more where those clips came from, check out Barry Norman's acerbic time capsule of that year's festival).

Chapter 31, "Unstubborn Stylist," chapter 32, "Dream Souls," and chapter 33, "On the Other Side" were supposed to be combined but as I wrote and recorded narration, gathered material, and finally edited the footage - allowing plenty of breathing room for Sweeney's rhythms in the second video - I realized there was just too much there. The first chapter covers Cannes '92, an overview of Sweeney's work, a comparison between the stylistic arc of Lynch's six Peaks episodes and his ten features, and an exploration of his early films' aesthetic. The second chapter covers Sweeney's and Lynch's work in three films from 1997 to 2001. Originally I thought that split would be enough, but I needed a third chapter to cover Lynch's drift into his own digital online experiments, the re-evaluation of Fire Walk With Me, and Sweeney's film Baraboo.

Chapter 36, my full chronological overview of season three, remains scheduled for May 21 - just over a week away. Starting tomorrow, all available time will be used to create this chapter. Therefore chapters 34 and 35 - covering Mark Frost and other original series collaborators - will probably have to premiere out of order in late May or early June (this is also how I made sure "7 Facts About Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me" went up by New Year's Eve 2014). Meanwhile, you can read about my last couple new chapters, "The Dance Resumes" (about Lynch and Frost on the cusp of creating season 3) and "25 Years Later..." (about the in-between years), visit the full Journey playlist, and keep up with each step of my work in "The path through Journey Through Twin Peaks".

Update 5/14: When published on the morning of May 13, this post originally described just two chapters, one already published and the other forthcoming, and was revised late the following night when I realized there would be three videos on this subject.

Update 6/20: I compiled the three chapters into a single standalone Vimeo video:

JOURNEY THROUGH TWIN PEAKS: "25 Years Later..." on the in-between era (video)

It took longer than expected (doesn't it always?) but I've finally finished my follow-up chapter after resuming Journey Through Twin Peaks nearly a month ago. This entry continues to examine the "in-between years" of the series, this time casting a wider net all the way from the release of Fire Walk With Me to the premiere of season three. Among the fish caught in this net: the Twin Peaks festival and magazine Wrapped in Plastic that arose simultaneously in the early nineties, the decades of television - ranging from network quirk to cable prestige - inspired by Peaks, and the (mostly) behind-the-scenes preparations of Lynch and Frost for season three. Next week I'll have another update ready, hopefully with several videos but at least one (focusing on David Lynch's work) if all else fails. You can keep track of my progress on the "path through Journey Through Twin Peaks" page. See you in the Lynchverse...

Update 5/30: At the time I forgot to mention a recent announcement about another video on my channel. I'll place it here now so it has a cross-post on this site...

The path through Journey Through Twin Peaks

This post is no longer active and has been superseded by

"NEW PATH THROUGH JOURNEY THROUGH TWIN PEAKS"

UPDATE April 2021: that schedule will also soon be expanded and adapted through 2022

If you enjoy this work, please consider becoming a PATRON to support it (which comes with exclusive monthly podcasts)

INTRODUCTION

Over the past year, I documented my path to these videos, a resumption of my 2014-15 video series Journey Through Twin Peaks - this ended when I published the first chapter a week ago. Here now is the path through the series, ensuring that it can be released over the spring and summer while I take care of a few other things as well. These steps are pretty self-explanatory; most are directly related to the creation of Journey but I also need to keep up with my monthly patron rewards, and I've decided to take a few weeks "off" before fully diving into Part 6 of the videos. During that time, I will build up a small backlog to carry me through the summer - another Mad Men viewing diary, plus repackaging some of my "Film in Focus" and/or "Twin Peaks Cinema" Patreon segments from the past two years as a brand new public podcast. Additionally, I'll take at least a week to do some behind-the-scenes work on my rebooted Twin Peaks character series, a project which will mostly be developed after these videos conclude.

Meanwhile, I will be publishing new posts at least once a week on this site. At first, these will go up every Wednesday and consist of either a video update of whatever chapters went up in the past week, my monthly patron podcast round-up, or a film review from my backlog. The Wednesday after Part 5 is fully published, I will post a full directory of all the videos in that part, as I did for the previous ones in 2014-15. When my Mad Men viewing diary is ready, I will publish a new episode write-up each Monday; at that point there will only be a Wednesday post when I need to round-up videos or podcasts. And after the viewing diary concludes, I'll return to the regular Wednesday schedule, at that point probably dominated by video updates (concluding, again, with a full round-up of Part 6 as well as perhaps a directory of both parts). (update 6/23: I've revised my approach to the weekly schedule, and also eliminated deadline dates from the following "Path")

In this Twitter thread, I will document the following steps even more closely, breaking down completion of tasks inside of the step as well. You can bookmark this post to check back periodically too. I will update each step to note when it is completed along the way. My hope is to wrap by the beginning of fall, but I won't be surprised if this takes longer. Enjoy the ride!

THE STEPS ON THE PATH

JOURNEY THROUGH TWIN PEAKS is back, starting today (video)

Tonight is the 30th anniversary of the Twin Peaks pilot in 1990. For a long time, this has been my target date to finally renew my Journey Through Twin Peaks video series, and I'm happy to announce that I've met that target. I just published the first new chapter in five years, "The Dance Resumes" (about the status of the series just before it began its comeback that would lead to season three), and you can watch it above.

Twin Peaks: "Dark Dreams on the Radio" (video)

While creating the first Journey Through Twin Peaks video series in 2014, I decided to preview one clip a week ahead of time. I was excited by the juxtaposition I'd found between the killer's reveal in Twin Peaks and W.B. Yeats' poem "The Second Coming", and I knew that the video containing it wouldn't be ready for release as early as expected - so I posted it early. Now I'm taking a similar step even further ahead of time, for a few reasons.

"Dark Dreams on the Radio" is a non-narrated montage of clips from Twin Peaks' third season (and Blue Velvet) cut to This Mortal Coil's cover of "Song to the Siren" (as incorporated into the sound mix of David Lynch's Lost Highway). There are a number of compelling rhymes between soundtrack and image, as well as between images from different works (or different parts of the same work). I first conceived of this idea - believe it or not - before the incredibly well-suited Part 17/18 aired and afterwards I was even more determined to launch the new Journey this way.

Ultimately, however, I decided that this would be a better beginning for Part 6, which will premiere in late May or June, rather than Part 5 (which is going up in a few days). But I still wanted to find a way for this montage to not only kick off Journey but conclude a month of shorter video essays that began in mid-March with (not accidentally) a montage, Far Away Music, scored to another version of "Song to the Siren," this one by its author Tim Buckley. That the images in that montage came from the work of Federico Fellini, a major inspiration for Lynch, only added another level of symmetry - as did last week's Side by Side video essay on Nights of Cabiria and La Dolce Vita, covering two of the films from that montage.

So here is a full-circle conclusion to my March cycle and a teaser for the new series. That's it for the run-up to Journey Through Twin Peaks. As I tweeted last week while preparing a season three marathon, and in the spirit of that season's finale...see you on the other side.

Side by Side: Nights of Cabiria & La Dolce Vita (video)

This video concludes both my five-entry Side by Side series and my run of new video essays this past month - which itself began with a tribute to Federico Fellini ("Far Away Shores" in my Montage series, joining La Strada with the two films featured here). This was the last subject I settled on after all the other videos were conceived, and the very last I edited (I'm writing these words on March 14, after beginning work on the Montage video way back in early 2018). I'm excited to dive into these two films here; the whole point of the Side by Side series is to create a dance between two works' similarities and differences, using each quality to emphasize the other, and Fellini's back-to-back masterpieces provide perfect fodder for this approach. Both chronicle their protagonists' journeys through Roman nights but the two characters begin and end up in very different places. Describing this is one thing; illustrating it was truly a joy. (A poignant one, at that; I had forgotten how profoundly moving the ending of Nights of Cabiria is in particular.)

I reviewed Nights of Cabiria as part of my Favorites series in 2016, reviewed La Dolce Vita as part of my Big Ones series in 2011, and compared La Dolce Vita with Twin Peaks, mostly to the similarly structured seven-days-and-seven-nights film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, on my Patreon podcast in 2019. That discussion built on a brief juxtaposition (one of my original "side by side" ventures) in "The Last Seven Days of Laura Palmer", a chapter in my Journey Through Twin Peaks series. Speaking of Journey, the next time I post a video essay - in a week to be precise, on the thirtieth anniversary of a certain show's pilot - will be my first entry in that series in five years. Something else (also related to Journey, though not officially a chapter) may post in the meantime, but we'll see. Schedules are welcome, but so are surprises, and there will be plenty of those in the months to come - for better or worse. Let's try to provide some of the better ones.

also available on Vimeo:

Side by Side: The Big Chill vs. Return of the Secaucus Seven (video)

This narrated video essay, a resumption of my Side by Side series, has been a long time in the making - and what an appropriate time this is for its debut. More on that shortly. Comparing two similar stories and then picking them apart to see what they reveal about different writer-directors, different classes, and different eras (the Carter seventies and the Reagan eighties), this video essay looks at the films in three particular contexts: cultural, philosophical, and political. In each case, we have the characters' sixties pasts, alluded to directly and indirectly, as guideposts to their present orientation. For me at least, it was fascinating to examine these films not just in relation to each other but in relation to those historical mythologies they evoke - as well as the then-unknown future evolution to follow: both the boomers' (from stereotypes of hippies to stereotypes of Trumpsters), and the generations, particularly millennials, who would live in their shadow. I try to address the latter very briefly at video's end but I'll also discuss it further here because I can't help myself. While I like to keep these cross-posts short (after all, the video is the point), this case - especially given this moment - calls for more.

SOME THOUGHTS ON THIS SUBJECT IN 2012/2016/2020

(AND LATE FEBRUARY/MID-MARCH/LATE MARCH)

Cinepoem: What the Soul Desires (+ The Full Cinepoem) (videos)

Easily the simplest entry in my Cinepoem series, and perhaps my favorite, "What the Soul Desires" selects excerpts from Augusta Theodosia Drane's poem (which, a century later, was adapted as a Donovan song) and plays with black-and-white, color, and widescreen clips to represent the spiritual yearning and rapture it describes. This also allowed me the perfect opportunity to end where I began, setting up the similarly-themed words of Alfred, Lord Tennyson and his Grail quest.

After all, these videos all connect to one another, each picking up directly where the other left off in a kind of stream-of-consciousness form of creation. I made these ties explicit by compiling all five videos into a single running which ends with a loop back to the beginning. For now I am just posting it to Vimeo, but in a couple days I will also add this "Full Cinepoem" to YouTube:

Few poems took longer to choose than this one; for a while I thought I would follow my Rimbaud Cinepoem with something by Baudelaire but when I thumbed through Flowers of Evil, I couldn't find anything that struck a particularly visual chord - to my surprise. So I spent months, off and on, scrolling through poetry archives online until I came across the work of the Tractarians, "High Anglican" poets, writers, scholars, and theologians who were part of the Oxford Movement in nineteenth-century Britain. Led by John Henry Newman, many of them eventually abandoned the Church of England altogether and converted to Catholicism, frequently becoming priests, monks, or nuns. I became fascinated with this relatively obscure history; something about members of a modern society radically leaping into a more traditional, disciplined practice felt resonant and compelling. These 1840s Englishmen and women, sacrificing the familiar comforts of bourgeois Protestantism for the both foreign and ancient call of Catholicism, reminded me of 1960s student radicals whose revolutionary fervor led them into the American Weather Underground, the Italian Red Brigades, the German Red Army Faction/Baader-Meinhof Gang, or the Japanese United Red Army. Of course, Newman and Drane didn't set off any bombs - and were essentially heading in the opposite ideological direction.

Drane's work in particular stuck out to me - both the poem that I ended up using, after considering many other authors and works, and her memoir which you can read online (it is written under the name Mother Francis Raphael, which she adopted after taking vows). This too makes for vivid reading, immersing us in both the emotional quality of her slow conversion and the day-to-day world of Victorian England. None of this bears directly on the video itself but I like the way her own journey rhymes with some of the more transporting visions of cinema, vulgar as the old nun may herself find that comparison! (She didn't even appreciate her own poetry, and hoped it and her autobiography would be burned upon her death.)

I discussed my obsession with the Oxford Movement and other related phenomena in a couple Patreon podcasts, here and here.

also on Vimeo:

images from ALL FILMS featured in the full Cinepoem

(in the order they are featured)

Cinepoem: Verses From War (video)

Fair warning for those looking for light viewing and/or distractions in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic: this video, whose coincidental premiere was planned months in advance (the video itself was created back in late 2018), illustrates a Walt Whitman poem about illness and death in a crowded hospital.

Usually, the videos in my Cinepoem series are relatively short; until now only the first was longer than three minutes. In this case, however, the Cinepoem runs past five minutes and incorporates two different poems; excerpts from Walt Whitman's 1865 "A March in the Ranks, Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown" (read by Denise Burns for the National Endowment for the Arts' "Poetry Out Loud") are sandwiched between the beginning and end of Herman Melville's 1866 "The Apparition" (read by Andrew Doig for LibriVox whose - no pun intended - voice I took the liberty of manipulating for effect). As the dates indicate, these are poems inspired by and dwelling on the Civil War. Melville's work abstracts the phenomenon, describing through metaphor the overwhelming sensation of a historical force tearing the country apart. Whitman's work goes in the other direction, delving into the nitty-gritty of stinking, dimly-lit medical quarters.

In some ways, the Melville poem was easier to illustrate because the abstracted imagery of the poem fueled abstraction of various clips I was using (which range from Andrei Tarkovsky epics to Mickey Mouse cartoons). With Whitman, I needed to strike a balance between departing too far from the very specific descriptions and, on the other hand, getting too literal - although I include hospital pictures from Ken Burns' Civil War documentary, for the most part I am not using Civil War films, and some aren't even war films at all. I really like the balance I struck, both within my treatment of that poem and between the two very different but similary-focused poems as well. The musical accompaniment varies between a slowed-down version of "11 Map Ref 41 Degrees N 93 W" by the post-punk band Wire, and Symphony No. 3/"Symphony of Sorrowful Songs" composed by Henryk Gorecki, which itself thematically overlaps with the poems and films.

The Cinepoem cycle will conclude (and renew) in a couple days with the final chapter picking up where this one began, as they all do...

This video is uploaded to Vimeo as well:

The 3 1/2 Minute Review: The Wind in the Willows (+ More thoughts on The Wind in the Willows) (videos)

My 3 1/2 Minute Review series was one of the few YouTube series I introduced in 2015 to make it to four entries before I shut it down in 2016. This, then, is the only entry I'm premiering this spring - the fifth and last to focus on a fantasy/sci-fi topic (previous entries included Neon Genesis Evangelion, The End of Evangelion, Revenge of the Sith, and The Dark Crystal). The Wind in the Willows - both book and adaptations - remains one of my most-covered subjects on this site, perhaps the most covered next to Twin Peaks. In fact, I had so much to say about it that I ended up breaking the "3 1/2 minute" format by creating a bonus video, "More thoughts on The Wind in the Willows." The first video follows the usual format of the series, discussing a single film - in this case the 1987 Rankin-Bass adaptation of the Kenneth Grahame novel; the second video expands to include clips from numerous other adaptations and also addresses the Disney World ride (and its replacement), the VHS tape on which my family recorded an airing of this film in the eighties (including some memorable kids' commercials), my own experimental film incorporating clips from Willows, and glimpses of all the famous voice actors in other roles. This follow-up concludes with an excerpt from my most extensive coverage of Willows, in which I lay out the "psychogeography" of the story, now illustrated by moving images of the various elements (like the River Bank, the Wild Wood, and the Wide World). I had a lot of fun putting this together, and hopefully you have fun watching it.

For more on The Wind in the Willows, check out my Wind in the Willows series exploring different themes of the book, my written review of the Rankin-Bass film, and my aforementioned experimental film What a Long Strange Trip It's Been. To browse these and several other Willows posts, explore my "Wind in the Willows" label.

Watch both Willows video essays combined into a single video on Vimeo:

Montage: Come On Over, Veronique (video)

My Montage series, which resumed last week with a pairing of Federico Fellini and Tim Buckley, concludes with my first "one-film" montage. Usually I feature at least a couple movies in these videos, whether from a similar genre (Haxan and the Hellraiser series), director (Out 1 and Duelle; La Strada, Nights of Cabiria, and La Dolce Vita), or other association (Malcolm X and Opening Night to honor the Honorary Oscar winners). This time, however, the clips I cut to Amy Winehouse's "Valerie ('68 Version)" are all from The Double Life of Veronique. Yet the pattern persists because the film is, of course, a dual narrative following two characters named Veronica (or variations thereof) from Poland and France. In a way, this video provided an opportunity to restructure their stories, in time to the verses of the song, and to put a new visual spin on their run-ins.

I discussed The Double Life of Veronique in my September Patreon podcast, as part of my "Twin Peaks Cinema" series, comparing it to the use of doubles in Twin Peaks and Laura's story in Fire Walk With Me.

Update 3/17: the video is now available on Vimeo as well...